Category: MBH Essays
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In 2002, my father-in-law passed away after a short illness, leaving us the money with which we purchased Mill Brook House. None of our parents ever saw the house, but it’s no stretch to connect Abe to it. Without him, our life in Charlemont would not exist. This is his centennial year. Abe was the…
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In a recent Christian Science Monitor Home Forum essay, Robert Klose recalled the joys and utility of wooden screen doors, which slammed happily all summer long, announcing arrivals and departures. I, too, remember the wooden screen doors of my childhood. There were several on my grandma’s cottage and one on our back door at home…
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Observing my china cabinet, a friend who knew my mother once observed that I had inherited her love of dishes. It’s not as though I never met a dish I didn’t like, but I do like far too many. Sifting through all the dinnerware suddenly available to me at Mill Brook House, it seems…
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Apart from Bill Cosby, whose reputation has suffered recently, our most famous local resident is probably glassmaker Josh Simpson. I first encountered Simpson’s work years ago at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, which owns one of his “megaplanets.” A Simpson “planet” is a spherical ball with shapes inside made with a variety of techniques and…
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We spent most of Saturday, June 20, celebrating Charlemont’s 250th birthday. State Representative Paul Mark and Senator Benjamin Downing presented the Town with a framed facsimile of its original charter, which the two men had paid to have restored. Five towns in Downing’s district had 250th birthdays this weekend, so the senator was busy. I…
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We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening. It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis. Maria’s story, at least as…
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With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small…
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When I asked my father why, when he graduated with his Ph.D. in 1940, he didn’t immediately begin a job search, he answered, “Because I knew we were going to war.” Apparently that same logic applied in reverse when it came to having a baby. With war looming, their biological clocks ticking, and the optimism…
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The excitement from Labor Day’s shoot (2012) had barely settled down when another movie crew came to Shelburne Falls to film The Judge, a melodrama set in Indiana. Mistaking Shelburne Falls for a town in Indiana requires considerable suspension of disbelief, but, as Irving Thalberg told his art director, who complained about using an ocean…
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My husband insists that Mill Brook House has returned me to my agrarian roots. I insist I don’t really have agrarian roots, but compared to growing up in a Brooklyn housing project…yes, okay. I grew up on the edge of the Michigan State University campus, an agrarian college, in the early 1950’s. Our neighborhood had…
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